Park City Transportation adds to fleet

As Park City’s winter population swells each weekend, growing pains are felt in every facet of the city.

The ski resorts need more lifts, hotels need more rooms and Park City Transportation needs a limousine Hummer.

Park City Transportation, a full-service company that bills itself as "the longest continuously running transportation company in Park City," just added $500,000 worth of new vehicles to its fleet to help lighten the load of its ever-increasing demand.

The current vehicles in the fleet include several buses "mid-sized coaches" able to carry from 17 to 34 passengers, an 18-passenger H2 Hummer limousine, 40 new 10-passenger vans and 16 Cadillac Escalades.

"We’re a full-service company," said General Manager Al Noble. "We run a taxi service. We run an airport service with the vans and Cadillac Escalades. We also do a charter service, which is mainly done in our mid-sized coaches."

Noble, who has been with the company for three years, said they try to keep all of the vehicles as new as possible, and always in good repair.

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"We operate on a lease program with our vehicles, so, when it comes to our vans and our Escalades, we turn them over every five months," he said. "That allows us to change our vehicles for either the winter or the summer, and it also means our passengers are always riding in a brand new vehicles."

Park City Transportation has tried to establish a niche with the business community in Park City. Noble said their clientele consists mainly of meeting planner/corporate business travelers, guests wanting Utah road tours, visitors to Park City and, of course, locals.

"Our major clients range from the different properties in and around Deer Valley to different meeting planners, such as Western Leisure in the valley," Noble said. "It’s really a broad spectrum."

Much like last season, Park City Transportation will offer its Passport program in order to give visitors to Park City the most mobility for the cheapest price. The program, which costs $72 for a week, is designed to alleviate the need for destination visitors to rent a car.

"What it entails: is you buy the passport and it includes round-trip share-ride transport to and from the airport, as well as free taxi service while they’re in town," Noble said. "It really cuts down on the need for a rental car. It’s our second year of operating this program, and we’re the only company in the nation who operates a program like this, that we know of."

Noble said they did a trial run on the program last year and it was extremely successful; that’s why they are bringing it back for 2006-07.

"We ran it last year and it was successful beyond our wildest expectations, because of the response," he said. "We were worried about managing people’s expectations and we received zero complaints, which, for a new program like that, is astounding."

Other recently implemented programs have had similar success. Three years ago Park City Transportation began offering a summer charter bus service to allow guests to see the wonders of Utah during their visit.

Initially, they established the service to bolster their summer business and balance out their year, but Noble said it has far exceeded expectations, which is why they need more buses.

"When we got the 33- and 29-passenger busses it was an experiment and we had a wonderful response to it," he said. "The increase is customer driven. We have to increase our fleet. The Hummer was mainly to add more luxury, and we plan to add more limousines in the future because we see that as a growing demand."

Noble said he has seen a dramatic increase in demand for both tour bus service and luxury service, such as that the Hummer limo provides. Noble said he plans to grow both areas of their fleet as soon as possible.

"The expansion is because of the phenomenal growth we’ve seen over the past few years in all segments," Noble added. "We’re going to continue to expand in the motor coach and luxury side."

Park City Transportation is located at 1555 Lower Iron Horse Loop Road in Park City and can be reached 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Their toll-free telephone number is (800) 637-3803 and the local number is (435) 649-8567.